How Cloud Storage Platform Box.net Raise $50 Million from salesforce

Early this morning as usual when i was going through the news i  read about the information i think i should share with you

Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised a whopping $50 million in new funding with participation from CRM giant Salesforce.com. Past investors also participated in the round, as well as new ‘strategic partners’, who will be revealed soon. Box’s past investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners. This brings Box’s total funding to $128 million.

Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.

The company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith out of their dorm rooms in 2005 with the goal of making it easy for people to access and share all their content, from anywhere. Today, the company provides storage solutions for 77% of the Fortune 500. This year, Box landed its biggest enterprise deal yet (and one of the largest cloud SaaS deals ever) with 18,000 seats with P&G.

The company says that 200,000+ new users join each month and the average enterprise deployment size doubles every two quarters. Over 1,000 new companies sign up for the business and enterprise editions monthly and Box has seen a 600% growth in mobile deployments in 2011 compared to all of 2010.

CEO Levie tells us in the video below that the future of enterprise software will be personal, social and smart, which means that content will actually connect users and help productivity in the enterprise. help connect users to content, make better decisions, faster, and work more effectively with anyone.

Box raised $48 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others earlier this year but Levie says that because of the strong venture market, the company’s strong performance, and the growth in the cloud, an expansion round made sense. And the company has even become a pricey acquisition target.

Salesforce, in particular, as a partner makes sense says Levie considering both of the company’s bets in the cloud. Box will be debuting integrations with Salesforce’s social network for the enterprise Chatter, and will continue to roll out deeper integrations in the future. And Levie says that most of Box’s customers user Salesforce as well.

Levie explains that the company didn’t need to raise more money, with the potential acceleration of growth in the cloud, the company wanted to be prepared to mitigate this growth. The new funding will be used to add additional infrastructure, for research and product development and for hiring. There are no current acquisitions on the horizon, but Levie says that the company would certainly be interested in acquiring if there is the right fit.